


Wife Swap

by merisunshine36



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Multi, crackfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-21
Updated: 2010-02-21
Packaged: 2017-10-07 10:57:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merisunshine36/pseuds/merisunshine36
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The brass at Starfleet Command reveal themselves to be the scheming no goodniks we always knew they were when, in a desperate attempt to increase recruitment numbers, they coerce staff into showcasing their real lives via a reality holovision series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wife Swap

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the kink meme prompt [here](http://community.livejournal.com/st_xi_kink/8893.html?thread=28094141#t28094141).

"I can't believe I agreed to this," Uhura muttered under her breath. "Why did I agree to this?"

Jim Kirk and Nyota Uhura sat in front of the camera in the little booth currently dominating the dining room of the tiny house Kirk and McCoy rented together. It was ominously titled "The Confessional", and Uhura hated it from the first day when she had tripped over one of the five hundred cords leading to numerous lights and cameras necessary for the recording of their most intimate and private thoughts…if being broadcast on the holovisions of millions of viewers could be called intimate.

"Aw, don't say that, darling. It's okay to admit that you've got a total girl boner for me." Kirk turned to look directly at the camera. "I think this was a brilliant idea on Starfleet's part."

Uhura snorted. "When have you ever been a fan of anything the brass tells you to do?"

Kirk ignored her. "The Wife Swap initiative is a great way to let Starfleet officers know each other outside of the workplace. Of course, in order to get Bones on board, I had to promise him I'd do that thing where I wear a pink apron and I--"

Uhura plugged her ears with her fingers and began singing arpeggios to block the offending scene from her mind. Vulcan sonic defense arpeggios, that is, which are on the septatonic scale and used to incapacitate inferior life forms.

"Agh, fuck!" Kirk cringed, his entire body recoiling from the sound. It was like the worst feedback ever heard ,with a heaping helping of red alert klaxons on the side.

Uhura cleared her throat and smiled. "Well, then. That worked nicely."

"Okay, now where were we." Kirk pulled out a minipadd covered in greasy fingerprints from the bag of Andorian Chiz (totally not the same thing as cheese, don't believe them if they try and tell you otherwise) Doodles he had inhaled an hour earlier. It contained a number of interview questions intended to give audiences an insider's look at what life was like for Captain Kirk and his new "wife".

"What is the biggest difference between your current and real your spouse?" he read aloud. "Dude, could Fleet be any more lame?"

They answered at the same time, voices overlapping one another.

"Well, Spock speaks eight languages— "

"Bones is a walking sex machine--"

"Three of them non-humanoid. Kirk speaks two— "

"While Uhura has tighter curves than the Autobahn--"

"…Federation Standard and Douchebag."

"...and these legs that go on for days. Days, I tell you!"

A tense silence filled the booth as they glared at one another other. Kirk broke down first, grinning at her from beneath wickedly long eyelashes. Uhura will never admit how her heart flutters a bit when she is the focus of that grin. Spock knew this, of course—there are not many things you can hide from your telepathic lover-- and it gave him no end of emotionally suppressed amusement.

Kirk and Uhura had been living in forced domesticity for nearly a month now. When the Enterprise had returned to Earth at the end of her first five-year mission, Starfleet had been looking to show the world that its officers were just like everyone else as a way to up recruiting numbers. They had only been able to ride the post-Narada recruitment swell for so long before people forgot about the magic of Starfleet and returned to being high school music teachers and health insurance claims processors.

Thus, the Wife Swap was born. Two weeks after they touched down in San Francisco, they had received a communiqué from the Starfleet Command informing them of the imminent arrival of camera crews in their respective homes. To put it simply, they had not been pleased. By the end of the first week:

Spock had written a 2-gigabyte historical treatise on the failings of reality television, then hacked into Starfleet Central Intelligence and sent it to everyone above the rank of Commander.

Uhura fumed silently, and rewired the microphones so that they couldn't pick up anything.

Kirk just cackled with glee, and went to make sure that he had an extra bottle of that cool Denebian lube that not only changed temperature based on your heart rate, it grew ridges. Ridges that moved. It wasn't every day that a man was offered the chance to shack up with Nyota Uhura, after all.

McCoy got on the internet and maxed out his credit limit buying bourbon. Boy, was he ever gonna need it.

The first episode was 42 minutes of the swapped couples staring at each other in frosty silence. Ratings went into the toilet , and Starfleet's approval numbers along with it. Soon after, they each received a tersely worded missive from the admiralty that if they did not agree to this, and agree now, not only would they not be going out on another mission, they would all be stuck dirtside and placed on duty at the Academy.

As janitors.

So Public Relations placed a few strategic rumors that McCoy cheated on Kirk and now might be pregnant with Spock's alien baby on various websites, and ratings soared. It turned out the pregnancy was really just a bad case of indigestion.

"Jeez, no need to be so mean," Kirk said, his pride wounded. "Maybe if I help you relax a little—a massage, a little hot oil, a little candlelight..."

Uhura stormed out of the tiny booth, knocking the camera over on her way out.

Kirk hoped that Starfleet wasn't going to charge him for that.

^___^___^

Commander Jean Pak, head of Public Relations for Starfleet, groaned aloud as she reviewed the footage of Spock and McCoy that they had recorded earlier that week. Most of the it was of McCoy sitting on the couch, drinking and either reading, listening to jazz, or watching porn. Spock chose to meditate—for hours. And hours. And hours. At one point, Jean thought that he was dead.

"They're killing me here! What am I supposed to do with this?" she asked aloud.

"You shouldn't have used the Vulcan baby plot so soon," remarked her intern for the summer, a precocious young Romulan named Ular. She had been hired as part of a diversity program that had been launched to refute accusations from the Romulan Star Empire that Starfleet's acceptance rate of Romulan applicants had dropped significantly after what Jean would only refer to as "The Nero Incident". "That was your ace in the hole."

"You're right. What was I thinking?" she scowled. "At least Kirk and Uhura fight. By the way, did you order some of that pollen I asked for? That kind that triggers our more...base urges?"

"The sex pollen? Did it yesterday."

"Great. I hope it works, we're going to have it pumped through the ventilation system so we can give audiences that hatesex between Kirk and Uhura they've been wanting."

Pak spun around in her chair, staring thoughtfully out of the window as she tried to think of a hook that would sell McCoy and Spock to audiences. "What would you say to guest starring on the show, Ular? You know, pretend to be a Romulan criminal and break into their house or something, get Spock all riled up."

Ular had stopped being surprised at the ignorant things humans said a long time ago. "I am not receiving enough credits working here to make that even remotely worth considering. Besides, you still owe me for that time I pretended to be a Vulcan for our last promotional vid."

Commander Pak winced. "Ah. Forgot about that one."

"Riiight." A pause, while they both thought. "How about an illness?"

"What about it?"

"Dr. McCoy is CMO, Commander Spock is a logic-driven, emotionally suppressed Vulcan...Spock falls ill, McCoy saves him, their relationship is transformed by a newly discovered depth of feeling between the two. I learned in my Human Sociology class that this kind of scenario is extremely popular, especially among Terran females."

Pak's eyes glittered madly. "Ular, you are a genius."

^-----^----^

McCoy scanned Spock with his tricorder for what must have been the fifth time, but it still showed nothing. He had come down with a serious case of vertigo this morning after breakfast and had spent a good hour in the bathroom emptying his stomach into the toilet. Now he lay curled up on the king-sized, circular bed that Kirk had insisted on buying, looking pale and miserable under a mound of quilts.

"Doctor, your assistance is not necessary." Spock's voice was pained.

"Shut up. I don't recall asking for your opinion." McCoy scowled at him. Vulcans didn't just get sick. Especially Spock. They had their brains stolen and their bodies taken over by alien powers, but they didn't just get sick.

"We should get you to a hospital—I can't do anything without my equipment here." He shined a light in Spock's eyes. "Pupils dilated, dehydration and nausea, vertigo—that could be anything!"

McCoy's comm chirruped. They were allowed limited contact with the outside world, so it could only be Kirk or Uhura.

"McCoy here."

"McCoy, is Spock okay?" Uhura's voice was concerned on the other end.

He frowned. "How did you know that--"

"We got a message from Starfleet." Apparently, it was Kirk too. "They said that he was ill."

Uhura again. "Put him on—I want to talk to him."

Spock took the communicator from McCoy, who settled it against the pillow rather than holding it in front of him, a sign of how bad off he really was.

"Greetings, _ashayam_. I hope that I have not caused you undue concern."

"Are you okay? Are you sure you're okay? We don't have to keep doing this, you know. Just give the word and I'll leave here right now, and Starfleet can kiss my black ass."

If McCoy didn't know better, he would say that the Vulcan was blushing. "That is quite unnecessary, Nyota."

"You just concentrate on getting better, Spock. Nyota's in good hands with me here." added Kirk.

McCoy scowled. He thought Kirk was joking, was almost positive he was, but--"I hope that doesn't mean what I think it means, kid."

Kirk's laugh rang out over the communicator. "Bones, you really do love me! Don't worry, the right hand and I are getting a lot of practice waiting for you to get back here. A lot of practice."

"Jim!" Uhura squealed. "That was way more than I ever wanted to know."

"A man's got needs, baby. A man's got needs."

^---^----^

Commander Pak paused the data feed and pumped her fist triumphantly in the air. "Yessss!" she crowed. "This is golden! Did you see the way McCoy looked at Spock, all doctorly concern? And the way Uhura pretended to be disgusted at the end—methinks the lady doth protest too much. Maybe we won't need that sex pollen after all."

Ular just shook her head. If there was one thing she had learned about humans, it was that they were all morally depraved. It made for a stressful work day, but excellent stories to tell her parents once she returned to Romulus.

"Slipping that concentrated cocoa liqueur into the replicator's plomeek soup recipe was brilliant! All the classic symptoms of intoxication, and he didn't even know what hit him. Great idea--I should give you a raise for that."

"But poisoning him wasn't my--"

There was a part of Ular that remembered the lecture her father had given her before she departed for San Francisco. He had encouraged her not to forget Romulan codes of honor while among the humans. There was a bigger part of her that was this close to making a down payment on that red hoverbike at the dealership near her apartment.

"Yes, I exhibited incredible insight and understanding of xenobiology in suggesting that. A raise would be in order...and perhaps a guarantee of a single room in the dormitories pending my acceptance to Starfleet Academy?" Ular thought humans were interesting, but that didn't mean she wanted to live with one.

"Don't push your luck, kid."

Ular shrugged. There was only so much one could do.


End file.
